$11.30

made by Jem Cohen. (raw footage for live performance by Boxhead Ensemble, 6 minutes)Must contain:Full frontal.Comedy.

Jem Cohen is a New York-based film- and videomaker. Often shooting in hundreds of locations with little or no additional crew, Cohen collects street footage, portraits, and sounds. The projects built from these archives defy easy categorization, thriving on the collision between documentary, narrative, and experimental approaches. Some of the projects are personal/political city portraits made on travels around the globe. Many center around daily life and ephemeral moments: things seen out of the corner of the eye and pulled into the center. Cohen has made two feature-length documentaries: Instrument (with and about Fugazi) and Benjamin Smoke (co-directed by Peter Sillen). Cohen's work has been broadcast by PBS, the BBC, Planete, and the Sundance Channel. Awards include first prizes at Locarno International Film Festival, Bonn Videonale, Festival Dei Popoli, Doubletake Documentary Festival, San Francisco Film Festival, Film + Arc, Graz, and the Barbara Aronofsky Latham Award 2000. Cohen is a Guggenheim and Rockefeller Fellow and received the Alpert Award for filmmaker, California Institute of the Arts and Herb Alpert Foundation, 2005.

I buy a filmmaker lunch and in trade they give me a short film made for the cost of the lunch. It started by accident – and necessity. In all, 50 short films have been commissioned (or eaten). Rules and ideas based on whatever we talked about at lunch are written on a napkin contract.
While each film has its own logic, it’s all about a variety of tastes. The overall metaphor is about community. It is very easy to help a filmmaker. Buy one lunch today. –Mike Plante